The Living Dead is a sprawling, massive, and mostly entertaining read, but it's also a frustrating, nearly-700 page testament to just how little life -- and originality -- remains in the zombie genre. It's been more than 50 years since George A. Romero first shocked audiences with his then-highly controversial black and white movie, Night of the Living Dead, but after five additional movies, plus ten years of Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s The Walking Dead and assorted spin-off television series (not to mention sixteen years worth of comics and a handful of video games), and countless other zombie flicks and books, including Brian Keene's uber-popular Bram Stoker Award-winning 2003 novel, The Rising and its spate of sequels, it's become abundantly clear that this particular horror niche is dead.

Yet, like the zombies themselves, this particular genre continues to lurch on, its tropes transgressing to cliche as the human survivors of these undead wastelands attempt to figure out all the things its audiences know all-too well by now. We know that as surely as you kill a vampire by staking it through the heart, you must kill the zombie by shooting it in the head. We're supposed to find suspense in characters fumbling their way into discovering all the rote genre trappings that have been ingrained in us for decades and suspend our disbelief enough to buy into a world where these characters have never even heard of a zombie. More likely, you'll be shouting at the book, demanding the characters to stop being stupid and shoot that shambling corpse in the head already! To the dozens of characters we follow in The Living Dead, everything that is new to them is an old, worn out hat to us, and not even Romero and Kraus can find much of a pulse in these discoveries as they work their way, in checklist fashion, from one worn out conceit to the next.

By forcing a reboot on the Romero legacy of the zombie outbreak, only scantly predating Night of the Living Dead, there's not much to be had in the way of originality or innovative ideas here. The characters and the contexts they're placed in are, at least, interesting enough, despite being overly familiar. If you're a regular reader of apocalyptic narratives or zombie books in general, you're likely to find these elements irritatingly familiar, and it almost becomes a bit of a guessing game to name off all the other books that have trod similar ground previously.

The Living Dead is divided into three acts. The bulk of Act One is relayed in mosaic fashion as we're introduced to a large number of disparate characters operating in their own disconnected environments. There's a pair of star-crossed morgue workers, the men and women of WNN broadcasting, the Navy crew operating aboard the floating island of an aircraft carrier, the Olympia, and a teenage girl who wakes up to find her trailer park neighbors in a sudden war against the undead.

Taking up more than half of the book's entire page count, Act One eventually devolves into a slog of familiarity as well-worn plot devices are repurposed and only occasionally given if not a face lift, then a minor bit of nip and tuck here and there. Act Two, blessedly, is much shorter and far more interesting as it condenses more than a decade of post-zombie apocalypse history into a handful of pages, moving us beyond the chronology of Romero’s films as depicted in Land of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Act Three takes us a full fifteen years into the future, with the survivors from the preceding acts attempting to establish a new civilization.

For as much as The Living Dead aggravated me, and too often left me yearning for other books to read despite being bound and determined to finish this damn epic, there were a number of high points to be found. Even if the parallels the authors’ attempt to draw between cell phones, social media, and zombification feel a bit too much like Old Man Yells At Clouds syndrome (and the simple fact that Stephen King already wrote that book with 2006’s Cell), their explorations of human nature and our place within the ecosystem, and their ruminations on the environment we all populate, were refreshingly thoughtful and welcome. I have no doubt, too, that a number of other readers will decry this hefty tome for being “too political,” outing themselves as a Johnny-come-lately to the works of George A. Romero, zombie fiction in general, and horror in particular. Make no mistake, it certainly is political, deliberately and keenly so. To me, this is a welcome aspect and plays a central role to the book’s theme. One character, Etta Hoffman, is responsible for cataloging the zombie apocalypse and recording the stories of these survivors, capturing the particular sentiments of a time and place, which just so happens to be the here and now, and good lord, is there ever a lot to say about present-day America, not all of it good or even particularly flattering nowadays. The racist and bigoted brigade of Red Hats among us will make plenty of hay over the number of minority characters that feature prominently throughout, and they will no doubt find plenty of other things to be ticked off about here, too, including copious amounts of shade thrown at their orange, small-handed Dear Leader. To that I can only say, good, fuck ‘em. I loved how openly and flagrantly political this book was, from its first pages right on through to its last.

While The Living Dead is much too long, and occasionally suffers for it, oftentimes feeling like an absolute slog to get through, much of its final act is an absolutely potent gut punch. There were moments that made me ache and left me feeling miserable, and I expect a number of other readers to be turned off by the darkly pessimistic detours Kraus takes these characters through. It is, however, a wholly fitting, and purely Romero-esque, finish that echoes the despair of the 1950 film that started us down this entire path. As a posthumous work, I can’t help but feel it’s ultimately a fitting and worthy eulogy to Romero’s films and reflections on society. I have little doubt that if Romero, who died in July 2017, had lived through these last few years of the Trump presidency, his finale to The Living Dead would echo Kraus’s finish in complete synchronicity. The end point, though, remains the same and its final message is certainly an appropriate one in these days of bitter political divides and tribal in-fighting. We all — each of us — need to do better, and be better. Otherwise, for now at least, the dead win.

I don’t know that this book was necessary.

I’m sort of bummed to say that. I mean, I love the idea of a tribute to Romero, and I did like many of the characters, but…

The beginning was terrific. I loved reading about how things started. But eventually, all the different story lines felt unsatisfying. I also wanted a bit more of a world view of what was happening.

Kraus is a skilled writer. There’s an autopsy scene that’s either the most horrific or most erotically charged thing I’ve read. And the fact that I don’t know which makes it even more horrifying.

But, aside from a few…zombie aberrations (?) that come later in the book, it’s pretty much standard zombie fare. It’s just zombie fare over decades of time.

I did like it. I just didn’t love it and I so wanted to.

*ARC Provided via Net Galley

Besides the Goldfinch, this is the longest book I've ever read. Unlike the Goldfinch, it didn't feel like it. I'm not even a big "zombie aficionado" and this book sucked me in from page one. An amalgamation of dozens of stories told from multiple points of view, it's a study in humanity, the best and worst of us. I cheered at moments, cringed at gore, flipped pages faster and faster to inhale this story. Truly a great read and an absolute credit to the genre.

This is a damn good book. This deserves to be on the NYT bestsellers list. This deserves to be mentioned as the height of zombie fiction alongside 'World War Z'.

There is blood and gore for the hardcore zombie fan, but there is also a thoughtful, well-written, well-constructed look at how people pull together when things fall apart. The ending, especially, lingers with you long after you've set the book aside.

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It all started with George Romero. After all the films this book looked to be the final word from Romero. No budget restrictions or worries about box office. Unfortunately he passed away before it could be completed.

Thus lies the rub with this one. There are a lot of times it just doesn't feel like Romero. Whether he's rewriting the history of his classics or another author finished his work, who knows. The book begins in an almost mosaic fashion; with multiple characters and jumping back and forth amongst their stories. Just when one plot thread was getting good it was jump to another. The classic Dead trilogy was very isolated so plot threads like a Navy ship being overrun just got boring for me.

The second act takes a lot of the earlier plot lines and just keeps adding to them like a snowball. This is where I personally think Romero's story ended and Kraus took over. By the third act I was just exhausted. Again, when I saw this was originally intended to be George's vision it's kind of sad that it ended up being finished by someone else.

Kraus is talented and he took on a major task here. His author's note shows he did his best to finish this, but he never actually worked with George so it's all just a what if. The third act reads like every zombie clone we've gotten recently; no matter who much you want to make it it's own thing its really not that unique.

I look at this book like The Irishman. You should spend your time on it as a symbol of respect if you want, but it's a big time investment with little payoff.